What can we learn from Oakland's warehouse tragedy?

Last Monday, two men in Oakland, California were charged with the manslaughter of 36 people after a fire at the Ghost Ship, a warehouse art space in California. The tragedy and the decision made by the courts goes to show the importance of warehouse safety, so what can businesses and warehouse owners learn from this sad event?

1. Tragedy Shouldn’t Be the Only Catalyst for Change 

If you run an unsafe warehouse, you might not realise it. You might do your day-to-day business completely unaware of the many ways that your building could be a danger to anyone inside of it. Perhaps this is because you think that health and safety protocols are unnecessary, or maybe it’s because no-one has been injured yet.

This is the biggest challenge for warehouse safety. If your business is losing money, it’s easy for someone to prove that to you. If your business is unsafe, it can be impossible to prove that it’s unsafe until something drastic happens.

This was the situation at the Ghost Ship. The building was filled with wooden furniture, wooden decorations and a whole host of other flammable materials, instruments, and art installations. Once the fire started, all of these objects only helped it to burn more intently. The building was also woefully unequipped for dealing with the fire. According to witnesses, the fire extinguishers they had were not enough to tackle the blaze and other reports have confirmed that fire exits were practically nonexistent — being blocked off and not signposted.

The response to all of this has been a crackdown on dangerous warehouse art spaces in the city and across the country, and this response is important. However, for the victims of the fire, this desire for safety comes too late. We shouldn’t need for tragedies like this to happen before something is done.

We can learn a lot from history. In 1974, after 28 people died in a warehouse explosion in Flixborough in North Lincolnshire, HSE was formed. Since then, workplace injuries have reduced by 77% and workplace fatalities have reduced by 85%. HSE’s stance makes the need for racking inspection services and other warehouse safety regulations clear. This has helped to make warehouses across the UK safer and these safer warehouses have contributed to the UK’s overall decline in workplace fatalities and injuries. 

In short, the positive reaction to the Flixborough tragedy and the lessons learned from it have been a huge victory for safety in the UK. We can only hope that we’ll see a similar change in California. Still, in both cases, it would have been better for everyone had proper safety been implemented before the tragedy. Sadly, this is not the case, so we must move forward doing the best we can.

2. A Knee-Jerk Reaction is Not a Good Approach to Safety

While it’s important that the government makes sure safety regulations are enforced, it’s also important that artists and other tenants aren’t made homeless by these regulations. As one artist pointed out, many of the victims of the Oakland Ghost Ship tragedy were artists themselves. If safety regulations would have simply meant closing down the Ghost Ship, those same tenants may have just wound up in even more dangerous and less regulated spaces.

The situation is complicated and is spurred on by increasing rent prices in American cities. A sensible approach would need to be long-term, would need government investment, and would need a proper dialogue between tenants, government officials, artists, locals, and landlords. None of this will be easy, especially not with the huge cuts to OSHA’s budget which President Trump is proposing.

3. No-One Wins The Blame Game

Assigning legal blame to the right person is a matter for the courts, and the courts have decided the blame lies with Max Harris and Derick Ion Almena. They owned the building, they held the party which led to the fire without a permit, and the building flouted many, many safety regulations.

However, Almena’s lawyers claim that the blame should really lie with the local government. According to them, the building was not properly inspected and that this negligence is what caused the fire. To those claims, local government and local fire officials have admitted that the building wasn’t inspected, but that this was due to chronic cuts to the city’s budget — specifically the fire department. If that’s the case, then perhaps the blame lies with politicians.

Then there are those who blame the fire, albeit indirectly, on the rising house and rent prices in the area which forced people to start living in a warehouse where health and safety was at a minimum.

Safety is everybody’s responsibility. This is an idea espoused by people in the health and safety industry across the world — from Novia Scotia, to Pennsylvania, to Abu Dhabi, to Singapore. It might sound like a somewhat hokey expression, but it’s an important idea at times like this.

True, cities need to do more to reduce the dangers of warehouse art spaces. True, state or federal governments need to give cities more money to help them do this. True, rent prices are too high and this did help lead to the tragedy. True, the two men charged had a responsibility of care as well, and were guilty of manslaughter. None of those statements contradict each other, because safety is everyone’s responsibility.

About the author

Justin O’Sullivan is a writer, warehouse safety expert, and the founder of Storage Equipment Experts. As a SEMA approved inspector, Justin provides a variety of racking inspection services for businesses across the UK and Ireland.